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The Clarence H. White School of Photography

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The Clarence H. White School of Photography The Clarence H. White School of Photography Bonnie Yochelson Clarence Hudson White (1871–1925) is remembered today as a gifted Pictorial photographer whose talent was recognized and promoted by Alfred Stieglitz at the turn of the twenti- eth century. In 1906, White moved from Ohio to New York to work more closely with Stieglitz, but the two men parted ways in 1910, when Stieglitz turned his back on Pictorial pho- tography to promote modern art. In New York, White began teaching photography, and his own art foundered. In 1923, he told a colleague, “I still have a thrill when I think I am on the right road, and a little envy when I see a beginner who appears to have arrived.”1 White’s legacy, however, leaves no cause for regret. His vision of photography’s future was prophetic; his social and aesthetic philosophy was con- sistent; and his program for training young photographers, which extended far beyond the classroom, was effective.2 By the time of his death, at age fifty-four, White had succeeded in establishing an institutional network to sup- port the artistic and professional ambitions of his students. The 1920s were a heady time, when an avowed socialist like White could launch his students’ art careers in the pages of Condé Nast magazines. That moment passed with the Depression, which deflated the artistic pretentions of pub- lishers, focusing their attention on the bottom line, and marked the collapse of the delicate balance of art and com- merce for which White had worked so tirelessly. But his efforts did not go unrecognized at the time. In 1938, the cultural magazine Coronet published profiles of twenty- two famous photographers. The first article was devoted to Stieglitz, whom the magazine dubbed a “man with a cause”; the second went to White, whom it called the fig. 1 Gertrude Käsebier. Family Portrait (Clarence H. White and Family). 1902. “peaceful warrior.”3 Gum platinum print, 13 5/16 × 9 ¾" (33.8 × 24.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner As a young man in the small town of Newark, Ohio, White worked as bookkeeper for a grocery firm. At age twenty-two he married Jane Felix and they honeymooned at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he first encountered convinced White to move his family to New York and to a wide array of international art. Soon thereafter, White become a professional photographer (fig. 1). Soon after his took up Pictorial photography, creating evocative tableaux arrival, he opened a studio, a block away from Stieglitz’s with Jane and her sister Letitia as his muses. Photography gallery on Fifth Avenue. linked him to the world beyond Newark: his photographs Almost immediately White began to teach. In 1907, he earned him international recognition in Pictorial exhibitions was offered a job teaching Pictorial photography in the art and publications; he provided photographic illustrations department of Columbia University’s Teachers College.4 for books of fiction and poetry; and through home portrait The following year, he also began teaching at the Brooklyn commissions, he befriended prominent Midwesterners, Institute of Arts and Sciences (now the Brooklyn Museum). such as Walt Whitman’s biographer Horace Traubel and Teachers College and the Brooklyn Institute were founded legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow. Those early successes to educate the working class, and both grew dramatically Yochelson 1 at the turn of the century in response to the huge swell of European immigrants. Because both programs trained art teachers, many of White’s students were women. The politi- cal agenda of those institutions reinforced White’s belief, based in his own experience, that art education could deep- en one’s appreciation of life and foster upward mobility.5 The chair of the Teachers College art department was Arthur Wesley Dow, a natural mentor for White, whose formal education had ended with high school. An accom- plished printmaker and amateur photographer, Dow had studied painting in Paris and at the Pont-Aven artist colony in Brittany, and was a leading American expert on Japanese prints. Dow’s textbook Composition, first published in 1899, wedded Eastern and Western art principles and asserted the expressive value of formal qualities such as spatial arrangement and tonal variation. Drawing on a wide range of examples from the history of art, Dow isolated design prin- ciples, including repetition, symmetry, and opposition, that he hoped would form the basis of a national art and elevate public taste. Espousing the Arts and Crafts critique of the fig. 2 Karl Struss. Vanishing Point II: Brooklyn Bridge From New York Side. 1912. Platinum print, 3 13/16 × 4 5/8" (9.7 × 11.7 cm). Amon Carter Museum of American Art, separation of fine and utilitarian art, Dow insisted that art Fort Worth. Image © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Forth Worth students master a set of principles applicable to all art forms, from furniture and fabrics to painting and sculpture. That Dow found a place for Pictorial photography in his utilitarian theory fortified White’s belief that photographers could find a productive use for their art. White’s first important protégé was Karl Struss, who When White was hired by Teachers College, he entered studied with him at Columbia from 1908 to 1912. Struss car- the eye of a storm over educational reform. Inspired by ried out White’s instruction to photograph “something close Columbia philosopher John Dewey, the college’s faculty by” with a vengeance. He created dozens of New York street believed that the citizenry of a stable democracy must be scenes that demonstrate not only a mastery of Dow’s design capable of purposeful thinking and that education must principles but an understanding of Cubism (fig. 2).8 In 1912, be active and experimental, not passive and imitative. White arranged for an exhibition of Struss’s New York photo- Central to their philosophy was Dewey’s “project method,” graphs at Teachers College, and when White opened his which asked students to solve problems derived from own school in 1914, he turned over his studio to Struss, who their immediate experience rather than master a roster of began a business in photographic illustration. required subjects. White’s opening a school began as a way for him to In his teaching, White adapted Dewey’s project method escape the heat of New York summers. He spent two sum- to assignments based on Dow’s design principles. Like mers with photographer F. Holland Day on Georgetown Dewey, White asked his students to find their photographic Island in Maine, and in 1910 bought a rundown farmhouse subjects within their immediate environment and empha- near Day’s house and opened a summer school, where Day, sized problem-solving experiments. Dorothea Lange, who photographer Gertrude Käsebier, and painter Max Weber studied with White in 1917, recalled that he would send gave student critiques. This working vacation allowed White, students out to photograph “something close by” and that his wife, and their three boys to enjoy a luxury they could she was “aware, dimly, that there was some kind of underly- not otherwise afford (fig. 3). The summer school was the ing wisdom in the man that would choose this utterly banal forerunner of the Clarence H. White School of Photography, thing.”6 Like Dewey, White believed that a teacher’s goal which White opened in 1914 in a brownstone owned by St. was to lead students to self-discovery. Lange found this Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, a historic church on the eastern side mysterious: “He would and did accept everything. He was of Greenwich Village. With classrooms and darkrooms on most uncritical . [but] you walked into that dreary room the lower floors and White’s family living upstairs, the White knowing that something was going to happen. Now what School provided an environment in which students became happened I don’t know, but you never forgot it. I can hear his part of his extended family. voice still.”7 Embracing Dow’s credo of utilitarian art-making, Meanwhile, the Photo-Secession, an elite corps of White arranged to have his students’ classroom assignments Pictorial photographers led by Stieglitz, came apart in the published in school publications, showing them that their wake of the 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial work could and should be shared with the community. Photography at the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Yochelson 2 founding of the Pictorial Photographers of America (PPA), which sought to draw together the nation’s best Pictorial photographers without the political infighting that had surrounded Stieglitz. The PPA’s first national initiative was to circulate two exhibitions to sixteen art museums, librar- ies, and art associations, and in 1918 its annual publication, Pictorial Photography in America, replaced Photo-Graphic Art as the White group publication. At the same time that the PPA was formed, White’s school moved to larger quar- ters, the legendary “Old Washington Irving House” on Gramercy Park. The White School’s thirty-week course of study consisted of classes in photographic technique and art appreciation. Despite White’s personal preference for straight platinum printing, he hired Paul L. Anderson, an electrical engineer and close friend of Struss, to teach the full range of darkroom processes. Anderson’s old-fashioned aesthetics — he was opposed to Dow’s teaching — proved no obstacle to the open- minded White. Indeed, he hired Max Weber — a painter with no experience in photography, who had studied with Dow before spending five years in Paris absorbing the art fig. 3 Clarence H. White. First Summer School, Five Islands, Maine.
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